There was a signature sound of my Jimmy Chous as they echoed through the hospital corridor where no stilettos had ever roamed before. Click, clack, click, click, click, click, click, click. That was the signature sound that Dr. Mushtaq had arrived in the neurology medical ward. It signaled to my colleagues, nurses and patients. The following titles were present. Neurologist. Epilepsy specialist. And never-to-recover chocolate addict. I entered neurology at a time that less than 5 percent of neurologists were women. Your first female member entered in 1927. The American Academy of Neurology was 30 years behind you. I knew very quickly to keep my head down, keep my heels on and stay laser focused.

But the truth of the matter was, I was overwhelmed. Struggling to keep up with sleep-deprived, 80- to 90-hour work weeks. My single prayer every morning was that nobody would figure out this dark, shameful secret that I was hiding underneath my starched white lab coat.

So where are your fancy wing-tipped shoes? I saw a few soul sister stilettos and your Nike, Converse. Where are they taking you in a path in life? We often walk through life mindlessly collecting additional degrees, titles, trying to reach a sales goal. We’re temporarily happy when we reach that point and then we step back and think something is missing. My life isn’t quite balanced. So, we set a new goal and we repeat this stress and success cycle. And that’s the real reason I am here today with this message to ask: Could you redefine your personal life knowing that MDRT focuses on development of a whole person? From this point of view, that inner peace is now your new success.

How did I come to this journey myself, as a doctor speaking on mindfulness? Well, I think Brian may be the only one that knows where Danville, Illinois is. Does anybody else know where Danville, Illinois is? Oh my gosh, there are a couple more people. That makes you all officially my next of kin. I normally don’t meet anybody that knows about the small town where I was born and raised. I am the daughter of immigrants to the United States. My parents left the land of mixed masala for the land of deep fried butter. And they had one success mantra for their only daughter. We have one daughter and you will become a doctor. I guess you all agreed with them, you were all in on it.

My momma will tell you, and she’s probably told you, Brian, I was a bona fide handful growing up. So, she recruited a little bit of help from all the aunties in our community. The aunties were other doctors’ wives like my mother, who came from all different religions and cultural backgrounds, who shared similar traditional family values. They came together as a tribe to make sure not only would I grow up to be a doctor, but that I would hopefully find a suitable husband. And not necessarily in that order, right?

I grew up to become the doctor that my aunties hoped I would marry. And I remember sitting one day in neurology clinic, very focused and there was a sudden knock at the door and the nurse said, “Dr. Mushtaq, we’re so sorry to interrupt you. Your mother is one the phone at the front of the clinic. And she says it’s really important.” And now of all the titles I hold, and many of you in Gen X understand, I am a dutiful daughter and I was mortified that maybe something was wrong with my parents’ health.

I ran up to the front of the clinic. And I picked up the phone and took a breath. “Hello mom, is everything OK? I’m in the middle of clinic.”

“Romie? Better. All your aunties came over for Chi ceremony today. Everybody says, ‘Hi to Romie. Oh, you’re a full doctor and professor now? Did you find a man in the hospital yet?’”

I knew they weren’t in trouble. I was. And I slowly started to sink in my stilettos. Face turning red. “Ah, Mom, I’m in the middle of my workday. Could I call you back?”

“No, no. We all have something very important to tell you. You have missed multiple family functions. We noticed you’re kind of stressed. We think you should be a little bit more mindful and meditate.”

“You called me in the middle of the workday to tell me this? I’ll call you back tonight when I’m done with work.”

“OK. OK. We know you are so busy and important now. Auntie people will call you at 7:30 with further instructions. Everybody say bye to Romie. Bye little girl, change the robe, yea.”

As a woman trying to be an important neurologist, I felt like I had just been spiritually assaulted. So, if you’re sitting here wondering why Ian, as the head of your committee for this meeting and the rest of that wonderful committee, would invite a doctor to talk about mindfulness? Take a moment to breathe. Be present. And trust that there’s a message your mind needs to hear and something that your heart to feel.

There’s a misnomer these days that mindfulness is about giving up all those titles and degrees and assets that we desire, denouncing them, moving to Eastern Asia, putting on some robes and sitting in a temple with monks. Mindfulness in modern day psychological terms means this one simple thing. I am present. I am here now. It is a present centered awareness without any judgment. And I realize talking to this room full of brilliant analytical financial minds, you’re thinking, “Yo, Ro. I can’t turn off the judgment.” That’s our analytical minds. Judgment is when we put emotion with that.

Many of you have heard of mind wholeness. It’s now making the rounds and becoming very trendy in media. Regular news coverage, anywhere from Harvard Business Review to the Wall Street Journal. Everyday media like Time magazine, and it can kind of be a put off. Is this some spiritual movement that’s overtaking the business world? I’m here hopefully in this session in the afternoon to show you that it is neither media hype nor it is a temporary trend. But it is one of the smartest decisions you could make for your personal health and your business’s bottom line. So much so that leading business and law schools now have mindfulness space reduction and mindful leadership classes for their students.

Our journey today? Let’s redefine the chaos in all our lives. A little dose of mindful medicine on how to heal stress and talk about how to cultivate calm. So, I start from the place of defining your chaos and that dark shameful secret that a lot of us try to sweep under the rug. What are all the things that are stressing me out? It’s everybody else’s fault. But the truth of the matter is that whatever is happening our lives can create this perception that I’m a prisoner in my own life and a prisoner in my own mind. When stress is simply not what’s happening out there but it’s how I’m perceiving what is coming at me and how I’m coping with it.

Anybody fly through the busiest airport in the world? Know what that is? Any guesses? I heard London. Chicago, no, the busiest airport in the world. Atlanta Hartsfield airport. I heard that from a couple of you. I had the honor of meeting the chief operating officer there. On a clear day, 120 to 140 flights fly in and out of Atlanta every hour. Our brains process more information than this in three seconds flat.

There is an area of the brain known as the amygdala. I call it the airport traffic control center of our brain. It is the powerful relay station that is figuring out, “Am I comfortable sitting in the chair?” “What is the temperature of this room?” “What is that next point that Dr. Romie is making that I need to remember?” “What can I let go?” Every emotion, every sensation, everything you need to convert from intermediate to short-term to long-term memory, goes through this airport traffic control center.

But what happens when we’re under physical or emotional stress? A concept known as inflammation. You’ve heard of some of these, the stress hormones in the brain go off. And what happens? We start to lose sleep. Kind of poor nutrition. And a little bit of emotional distress.

I have this question because I do this for a living now, speaking. Does anybody in this room actually crave something like kale and arugula with olive oil when you’re stressed out? One hand. I want to learn about your brain after this.

I had an audience about this size at Microsoft last December, a bunch of STEM folks. They like to play stump-the-brain-scientist. And somebody stood up and said, “Yo, Dr. Romie. I crave carrots when I’m stressed out. Could you explain that?”

And I just kind of sat there with the blood draining from my face trying to rack every medical study in my brain. And I thought, “Carrots?”

He said, “That container at the grocery store that has the apples and carrots already chopped up for you with this really good caramel apple dipping sauce.”

Well, I’ll tell you this, coming from the Midwest and having worked there, we have some fabulous state fairs and we all must be stressed because the top stress craving foods are all found there. If you’re not part of my tribe where chocolate is medicine, the next most commonly craved food when we’re stressed is salty. Your potato chips. Carbohydrates. Fried foods, i.e., the deep-fried Oreo cookies. And the cheese and carbohydrate combos. I eat pizza. Right? This is actually what happens when we’re there.

What is that conflict inflammation? Some of you may have heard this. We’re talking about it more and more in the media. It seems like every time I’m on-air on the weekends there’s another study coming out. And think that this problem of inflammation that starts in the airport traffic control center has runways that control every other organ and hormone system in our body. And that inflammation is actually what’s at the root of the major diseases that are burdening our lives in the healthcare system today. From heart disease to cancer, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, arthritis. The list goes on and on. And this is the foundation of integrative and functional medicine, all based in science.

So, you’re thinking now, “How do I know if that’s me?” Well, if you come to see us in clinic at the Center for Natural and Integrative Medicine in Orlando or any other clinic like this, there’s a battery of labs we can collect looking for markers of inflammation in your blood, in your urine, your hormones, test your heart rate variability. It all sounds rather complicated but here are three simple questions that I know the integrity of the airport traffic control center in your brain. The first place it starts is in our circadian rhythm and our management of sleep.

So, answer one of these three questions, you can do this personally. Do you have difficulty falling asleep because you can’t shut your thoughts off in your mind? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, maybe to use the restroom, but you find you can’t go back to sleep? Now you’re just wide awake so you’re like, “Let me just answer a few emails or run a load of laundry before the kids get up.” Or you may be telling me, “Doc, I get that prescribed six to eight hours of sleep but I wake up feeling exhausted, like I got run over by a semi truck.” Those are the ones I worry about the most. Find me after the lecture and we’ll chat.

These are how I know your airport traffic control center is off. Now from time to time, when we all have deadlines, this can happen. But if this is happening for more than three to five days in a row, it’s a signal that the inflammation has taken over. And that the paradigm of medicine is now changing. That the three, four top causes of hospitalizations and death for men and women in the United States are no longer based on one condition, obesity, but that one imbalance of inflammation is leading to people that have a myriad of problems like depression, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Why am I talking to you all about this and so passionately? Because the Center for Disease Control running their last workplace study in 2015, measuring how stressed we are in the United States, found that 90 percent of outpatient doctor’s office visits are due to stress related illnesses. So that if we managed our stress, we wouldn’t be seeing the doctors as much. And what was the number one thing that was bringing individuals to the office complaining of stress? Our jobs.

So, I just don’t tell this to you as a brain doctor and a medical journalist, but I share this story with you as a patient. I thought well maybe only my mom and my aunties will figure it out that I wasn’t handling my stress very well. I started to have chest pain and I was responsible as a doctor. I went to the doctor. They told me you’re a typical type A personality. Junior faculty member. Take an antacid, lay off the chocolate. I followed orders for a week. It didn’t get better so I added the chocolate back on, right? Good doctor, yes.

But then it slowly started to progress that I couldn’t swallow. And I was having severe disabling chest pains. Started to have these panicked episodes in the middle of the night where I got up and I could no longer breathe. I was choking on my own saliva and vomit. It turns out that I have a rare medical disorder known as achalasia. It effects about one to 1.5 million people in the United States. But because I was not managing my own stress and chronically sleep deprived, that inflammation from the brain and the way innervates the gut, made is so severe that by the time I got diagnosed I had precancerous lesions in the esophagus and required emergency surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle.

It was in that moment I sat there in that cloud of dark shame, not worried about whether I was going to die in my early 30s from cancer but wondering how did I get here? So, if you’re having that moment in your life right now, I am here today as your personal wake-up call. I was so focused on everything going on outside of me, my job, my failed marriage, my finances, that I forgot to stop and look within. I underwent surgery, complete reconstruction. Thankfully there was no cancer. They thought I would need several more surgeries. I went back home to Danville to recover and to take time off from work and figure out what I was going to do next. And that was when I finally listened to my mom and my aunties. And I started to pray and meditate and do yoga. And I noticed I didn’t need all of that pain medication after surgery. And that dark, deep depression and anxiety, I was lifting out of it. It sent me on a journey around the world working with some of the most masterful meditation teachers, yoga teachers and doctors to learn these concepts of Eastern medicine for my own healing. And as I got better, how could I not think, as a doctor, why am I not doing this for my own patients suffering from brain and mental health conditions? I came back to the United States, decided to transition away from neurology into integrative medicine and figure out how to bring both of them together.

And this is where we are. Because as we go back with this stress and this mental anguish to our jobs. Global Attitudes Benefit Survey says, if you’re a highly stressed employee, and this is obvious, you’re 50 percent more likely to utilize your sick days. And this is affecting our business bottom line. That in our service-based industries, which is similar to both you and I, there’s an average of 25 percent reduction in productivity. More importantly, employee engagement. Across the generations, people want to be inspired by work. They want to be present. We know it affects bottom line. But if an employee has high stress levels, they’re much more likely to be disengaged than somebody who’s managing their stress.

So, what would a brain doctor who advocates mindfulness and meditation tell you is a personal solution to help you and your business bottom line heal the stress and shift from chaos to calm? We’ve come back to this concept of mindfulness that I am present here in this moment with you. And how do I carry that on into my health and into business? It’s one of my healing, guiding principles that meditation is medicine for the mind. That’s a very strong statement for a licensed medical doctor and a medical journalist to make. Isn’t it? And where does that come from? I started by kind of dispelling the notion that meditation means you’re being invited to practice a religion that may be different from the one you practice, or if you choose not to practice a religion yourself.

From a brain doctor’s point of view and a psychology point of view, meditation is simply saying, “I’m going to make an appointment with myself to go within.” That is as simple as what it is. And what do we know about meditation? We talked about the stress response and the airport traffic control center shutting down. Well, the opposite Dr. Herbert Benson, an amazing physician who’s still alive at Harvard Medical School, started to do this research back in the 1970s looking at the brains and the heart health of people who meditate regularly. And coined something known as the relaxation response.

Now, if you want your airport traffic control center in the brain to be functioning all systems go, you want to be in a state of the relaxation response where the autonomic nervous system is kicked into what’s known as the parasympathetic response. And how do we do this? Brings down the blood pressure. Helps us feel relaxed, get focused. It’s through controlled breathing, meditation and relaxation techniques. Ongoing medical studies, the journals and the media are full. Decreases blood pressure. Now the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association recommend people who are diagnosed with high blood pressure start a meditation practice. Helps with muscle tension, thought process, sleep, increased sense of well-being. The list goes on and on.

But I know in a high functioning, top performing group like this, many of you may be sitting here already with outstanding health. How else is meditation of benefit? And this is where we talk about bringing this concept and this peak performance of your brain into mindful leadership. And cultivating this present-centered awareness. Now I may be aging myself. Did anybody grow up watching “The Jetsons”? I grew up fearing I would have an attending physician or a boss like Mr. Spacely — constantly getting red in the face and screaming. And I think of him as the antithesis of the mindful leader. A mindful leader knows how to inspire others by cultivating focus, creativity, compassion all in the service of others. That question of: How can I be of service to others? And at the same time, succeed in my own business and line of focus.

So, as I began to write my first book, “The Busy Brain Cure,” trying to help people who can’t shut off their busy brains, we did an audit of my current practice. And I was surprised that only about 50 percent of my patients came in with an actual brain or mental health diagnosis like insomnia, depression, anxiety. The other 50 percent were peak performers like every single one of you.

Examples are working with an NBA client and now its entire team. He had seen me on Fox News. He said, “Yo, my homie, Dr. Romie,” as they call me on the news. “I need to improve my free throw percentage range. I’ve got the coach in place.” He was obviously very physically fit, but realized that his mind had hit a plateau and that the mindfulness-based stress reduction might help him reach the next level. Now I’m not going to lie, I had to first learn what a free throw percentage was. And once we got over that hurdle, he was in the middle of the season, and by the end of the season, he exceeded the expectations by putting a meditation practice in place.

I worked with dozens of C-suite-level executives and Fortune 500 companies and associations that are facing the challenges that this unique environment today in the United States, and globally, brings us. Especially when it comes to managing stressful employees, during acquisitions and mergers. One of my favorite ones was a clinic lobbyist pretty large. And people would recognize a Grammy Award winning rap artist who had come in to see me. He stood up from the other side of the office and said, “Yo, bro, my head is full of some negativity and I want to channel some positivity and creativity back into my rap music. Do you think you can help me?”

I took a breath and said, “We need to stop the self-hate and meditate.”

Don’t worry. I’m not going to drop a rap lyric here. They didn’t teach me that in medical school either. So really the idea is that, in order to achieve peak performance, meditation not only helps us calm down the inflammation and help, but once we turn that stress response off in our airport traffic control centers, we now are engaging the creative centers of the brain. We become laser focused on our task, improve productivity and our peak performance.

And guess what? It doesn’t really cost anything to sit down and find that time to make an appointment with yourself. Here are some examples of companies well known to everybody in this audience who’ve implemented successfully mindfulness-based programs. Intel started a program called Awake. It was based on meditation and concepts in mindfulness such as compassion and kindness. They started with 1,500 employees. This was originally reported in 2014. They conducted psychologic testing and found that, on average, each individual employee felt 33 percent better. Could you imagine feeling happier to come to work? Not only did they reduce stress, but they were now more productive and innovative. Now in 160 offices around the world, the Awake program of mindfulness-based meditation is implemented with every employee.

Aetna Insurance, many of you may have seen their CEO being interviewed on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday. It was kind of the wakeup call to many Fortune 500 companies about this concept. He’s been meditating for more than 30 years. Something he kept quiet until this revolution arrived here in the United States. And when they measured 15,000 employees who were asked to go to yoga or a meditation class just twice a week during their lunch hour, not only was there marked improvement in productivity and sleep, which I love as a brain doctor, but on average there was a $3,000 per employee reduction in medical claims. That’s significant. All from sitting and being present with yourself.

So, this whole idea, I want to be mindful and a more mindful leader, is that I can’t get to know others until I first get to know myself honestly. And my mission is that you get to do it before you end up on a hospital gurney. I’ve been there. So let’s try, if you’ll humor me and meditate. I’ll ask if your phone is not already in airplane mode, please do so. And if your phone or pen and tablet is in your hand, put it under your chair and come to a comfortable position. And if you’re not open to trying meditation, just sit quietly and not talk with the people that would like to try. And if you already are a seasoned mediator as many of you I met in the break told me you are, help me hold the space for those of us who are doing the meditation watching here and on live stream for the very first time.

Find a comfortable position in your chair. You can cross your legs, keep your legs uncrossed, hands down to the side or in your lap, whatever is most comfortable. I’m going to ask you to close your eyes. Good. And you can take a moment and open your eyes and peek around and make sure everybody else closed their eyes. Go ahead and do that if you need to. And if you don’t feel like closing your eyes, just find a focal point on the floor to keep your gaze. And take a nice deep inhale through your nose and open the mouth and exhale out deeply. Beautiful. Inhale. One, two, three. Hold the breath. Exhale. One, two, three, four. As you inhale expand your belly out towards me, towards the stage, like you’re growing a bowling ball in there. Hold the breath. And exhale. Belly back toward your spine. Three, four, excellent.

I’ll mind the time. You continue this deep breathing. Inhaling. Two, three. Holding the breath. And exhale. Two, three, four.

And with the next exhale bring your awareness back into the room and into this space. You can wiggle your toes in your shoes. Whenever you’re ready you can open your eyes. Powerful energy coming from this group. Thank you. It’s an honor to read meditation in this room.

How many people was that your first time sitting down and silently connecting to your breath? Thank you. It’s always an honor to lead you. Thank you for being open to try it and meet people who are meditating for the first time.

From the time I started to cue you with the instructions to the time I brought you out, that was about two minutes. This controlled breathing exercise, doing it for three minutes is what it takes on brain scans to switch the amygdala of the airport traffic control center from a stress response to a relaxation response. And that all airport runways are flowing. It is one of the most favorite exercises that I get feedback on from my corporate clients. That when they’re about to start a meeting, especially people coming from different divisions and cell phones are out and people are focused or a there is a contentious agenda, that everybody puts everything down and does this breathing exercise for three minutes. Brings everybody focused and present. This is the foundation for starting a meditation practice. This afternoon, in the workshop, I will teach you how to take an entire practice home to heal and lead from a calm consciousness. And we’ll be having a full meditation session tomorrow morning where we’ll be doing more meditating and less talking.

So, one of the most common questions I get as I wrap up is, “Dr. Romie, do you meditate every day or do you just kind of go on and talk about the science and do this?” If you talk to my team, either my clinic or my team that handles all my speaking and media engagements, they will tell you that every day my schedule is built around my meditation time. Why do I meditate every day? Because seven years ago when I was sitting with my mom and dad in that surgeon’s office in Seattle, they told me that I was the worst case of achalasia they had ever seen and that I had a very grim prognosis, that this was probably going to be the first of three surgeries. Did I have disability insurance? It’s really humbling saying this to a room full of folks that deal with insurance. I didn’t even know. I was in my young 30s. I wasn’t thinking about disability at that time.

I went on this journey around the world to understand these concepts of integrative medicine and meditation. Now, seven years later, I’ve not only not had any further surgeries, I’m cognitively sharper today at 43 than at 23 when I was in medical school. Why am I asking you all to consider a mindful meditation practice? Because I know as the thought leaders and people who excel in your industry, I want to keep you healthy and out of the doctors’ offices. But you all are also the influencers of your teams and your families and your communities. That we must shift from this place of a stress success cycle to finding that inner peace.

And don’t think us aunties won’t call you in your office. If you get stressed out, we are to remind you to meditate because we are the voice of resistance and self-judgment and self-hate and, when that comes up, listen to our Dr. Romie. Take a moment and breathe and meditate.

I’m Dr. Romie, and inner peace is your new success.

Dr. Romie Mushtaq is a traditionally trained neurologist with additional board certification in integrative medicine. After undergoing life-saving surgery, she traveled around the world learning mindfulness-based techniques and now helps individuals achieve brain- and mental health holistically at the Center for Natural and Integrative Medicine in Orlando, Florida. Mushtaq combines her unique expertise in neuroscience and mindfulness to teach stress management and mindful leadership to Fortune 500 companies, universities and groups around the country. She completed her medical training at the Medical University of South Carolina, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Michigan. She previously served as faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin.